Our View: Legislature must raise cap on charters

As the clock ticks down on the Legislature's year — lawmakers are due to complete formal sessions at the end of July — there are several items of unfinished business, none more important than raising the cap on charter schools.

As the clock ticks down on the Legislature’s year — lawmakers are due to complete formal sessions at the end of July — there are several items of unfinished business, none more important than raising the cap on charter schools.

Charter schools are working, especially here in Massachusetts. A national study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) found that a typical student in a Massachusetts charter school gets a month and a half more learning in reading each year, and two and a half months in math, than a student in a district school. In Boston charters, the difference is even more dramatic. The Boston charter schools could serve as national models for improving school performance and narrowing the achievement gap, the study’s authors said.

The successful innovations of charter schools should be shared and replicated, and some of them have been. Meanwhile, about 45,000 students are on waitlists for charter school slots. And even though the original cap on new charter schools was raised just four years ago, Boston and Holyoke have already hit the new cap, and a few other underperforming districts are coming close.

The House has already approved raising the cap on charters in the lowest-performing districts and extending the “turnaround” powers given to principals and superintendents that have proven effective in getting chronically failing schools on a new path. Those powers allow administrators to hire without regard to seniority, to replace poorly performing educators, extend the school day and to amend union contracts through an expedited process.

The most successful — and most needed — charter schools are in urban areas, and that’s where the waitlists for charter openings are longest. State education officials did those students a grave disservice recently by changing the way the state rates school district performance.

Over the objections of charter school advocates, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education last month changed the methodology the state uses to determine which districts are in the “lowest-performing 10 percent” category, qualifying them for more charter school seats. In theory, the change is supposed to give greater weight to school districts showing year-to-year improvement. In practice, the change will deny new charter seats to students in districts with large minority populations, including Worcester, Brockton, Fitchburg and Lowell.

The districts that will now fall into the lowest 10 percent operate mostly small schools in rural areas, serving mostly nonminority students. According to charter school advocates, districts serving 68,000 students would no longer be eligible for the higher charter cap, while districts serving 8,000 students would take their place in the bottom 10 percent.

Charter schools have always had their critics, too often more concerned about their impacts on local school budgets and the power of teachers unions than about the benefits they offer to students. But after 20 years of experimentation, charter schools have proved their value. The Senate should add its approval to the bill carefully crafted in the House, and should move to reverse the changes engineered by the state Board of Education.